Posted
by
timothyon Sunday March 22, 2009 @08:25PM
from the pretty-people-pool-in-airports dept.

Slatterz writes "A decade ago people were talking about the death of distance, and how the internet would make physical geography irrelevant. This has not come to pass; there are still places around the world that are hubs of technology just as there are for air travel, product manufacturing or natural resource exploitation. This list of the ten best IT centres of excellence includes some interesting trivia about Station X during the Second World War, why Romania is teeming with software developers, Silicon Valley, Fort Meade Maryland, and Zhongguancun in China, where Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters."

I could see why countries were internet access isn't common but technology is at a reasonible level would require lots of programmers.
language barreries would be the other reason - no off the self versions of software in your native language.

Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group and every major world religion (including no religion). They work together, peacefully, to make better lives for themselves and their children. Look around the rest of the world. This place is unique and special. I see lots of other places around the world where folks insist on segregating themselves by ethnicity and/or religion

You see, hovering is not for those merely initiated, only ones who mastered at least 2/3 of all emacs keyboard shortcuts can attempt this arcane craft that RMS himself uses to aid himself in fendind off ninjas and visiting Cory Doctorow.

Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group and every major world religion (including no religion). They work together, peacefully, to make better lives for themselves and their children. Look around the rest of the world. This place is unique and special. I see lots of other places around the world where folks insist on segregating themselves by ethnicity and/or religion. They must hate my home, Silicon Valley.
Peace.

Hate to break it to you, but this happens in most of the United States. In my experience, a lot of the people in California just think they are special.

I used to live in California. They may not discriminate on ethnicity or religion, but go visit the Bay Area with an NRA teeshirt and a rifle to hunt some deer and see how nice everyone is to you.

There are places in the bay area that would be entirely unfazed by your rifle and NRA tee-shirt but you have to seek them out. But, considering the fact housing is dense enough that to safely and legally hunt deer you would have to drive 2 to 3 hours away, it's not too surprising you got the response you did. Drive that 2 or 3 hours and you will get the reception you want without looking for it. California is a big and diverse state. Generalizations about it usually usually indicate a lack of experience wit

There are places in the bay area that would be entirely unfazed by your rifle and NRA tee-shirt but you have to seek them out. But, considering the fact housing is dense enough that to safely and legally hunt deer you would have to drive 2 to 3 hours away, it's not too surprising you got the response you did. Drive that 2 or 3 hours and you will get the reception you want without looking for it. California is a big and diverse state. Generalizations about it usually usually indicate a lack of experience with it.

Like I said in my other reply, I don't actually hunt out of pure laziness. I just picked an example that I knew would get a rise out of the people who live in that area based on my experience living there.

As you say, California is a big and diverse state and there are tons of cool people living there. There are also tons of self-obsessed pricks, just like everywhere else in the world.

I moved from Cali to New Mexico several years ago. Obviously it isn't the same as California. But there are some pretty

I work in the Bay area and we used to have an avid hunter who worked at our company. He brought in all types of meat to company parties from wild pig sausage to venison jerky. I never noticed any negative behavior towards him because of that, and a decent amount of the employees are vegetarian.

Your own experience, while possibly true (though I have my doubts) is not everyone's experience.

discriminate on ethnicity or religion, but go visit the Bay Area with an NRA teeshirt and a rifle to hunt some deer and see how nice everyone is to you.

Discrimination is taking action based upon a prejudice; you're looking at someone's skin colour or hair, things they have no control over, and making assumptions about their character based upon that. Religion is not strictly something you have no choice over, but many arabs and jews share common genetics which make them identifiable to the prejudiced (even

Probably directly proportional to how nice you are to animals. In some places, they don't like it when you shoot animals for fun.

Thank you for proving my point.

I actually don't hunt myself, but I am of the opinion that animals need to die for humans to live and I would have no problem killing something that I needed to eat. If someone actually wants to go through with all the BS it takes to hunt nowdays (hunting permit/draw, gun permit, learning to shoot reliably under pressure, finding the animal, skinning the animal and packing it out), more power to them. It's a little piece of history that most of us don't appreciate about when we are in a hurry to buy our chicken and cow meat in the supermarket, on the way home to watch Survivor or get on the internet.

People were meant to kill animals and plants to eat them and use them as resources to live. Much in the same way that animals kill each other for life to continue. The key is to do it responsibly, like the other animals do.

The GP was refering to people that hunt for fun. He said nothing about people that hunt for need or that use the kill for their own consumption.

As for the NRA it may be a legal organization in the US, but they are seen as nutcases in many places, and for many good reasons (their extreme views about gun ownership are ayathollic and confrontational, so it should be no surprise if some people find them disagreeable).

It doesn't matter why they do it. The point is that the enlightened Bay Area has just as much bias and intolerance as everywhere else. Your comment about the NRA is case in point. Without further information about your gun ownership views, I can only surmise they would find them disagreeable in kind.

For all hunters, Hunting is violent. But its not about the violence, right? Most, if not all hunting is fun, right? But its not about the fun. Its about life and death, the struggle for survival, and the thrill of having your life in the balance... because in the bush its either you (and your scoped semi-auto big cal rifel)... or the beast (a fearless big eyed doe, or viscious sandhill crane, or... the big game... a feral pig with a furious squeel!).

it happens with any company that is multinational, regardless of location. Its difficult to do any serious business in some countries unless you speak the language. The company I worked at in Canada was at least 50% visible minorities including: chinese, japanese, thai, african, native-canadian (or whatever the term du jour is), south american (I think mostly brazil), mexican, middle-eastern, indian, pakistani, etc our parent company was from spain so at least 40% of the office spoke spanish. The sales and

Yes, we call them H-1B's. In other news, our local unemployment rate is now above 10%.

Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group...

Can you assure us that those unemployed can cover the unfilled positions? When I used to interview people (the UK, I know, not the same, but it seems to be in a similar situation) we could not fill positions (even entry level ones) because most students were going for soft option education in University (media studies, photography, film making, etc) instead of science and engineering, which is the exact opposite of what has happened in other countries.

And nowadays in big corporations everywhere you see the same thing. When I worked in Warsaw there were Indian, Chinese, English, German, Polish and of course yours truly (Mexican), in Kula Lumpur there were Malays (Muslim), Thai (Buddhist), Chinese, varied westerners, Iranians, Indian, all working happily without undue complications.

Your comment sounds terribly parochial to be frank, you guys in the US need to get out of your country a bit more.

Bar extremist regimes (Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea) where people are separated in purpose for religious, ethnic or ideological reasons, in most civilized places (normally democracies) you will see hot spots where peaceful coexistence is the norm.

Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group and every major world religion (including no religion). They work together, peacefully, to make better lives for themselves and their children.

Yes, this is entirely unlike any other place in the world, especially unlike New York. Though here, we're polite enough not to discuss religion at work unlike you rude-assed left coasters.

It's a part of Haidian district in Beijing. As an expat living there, my friends and I used to take day trips ($6 for a 45-minute cab ride) down there to buy cheap computer parts at enormous (and always packed) indoor markets.

All of the VA/MD area around Washington is a big center for computers/IT. NIST is in Gaithersburg, MD and DARPA in Virginia Square, VA, as well as several universities (e.g., UMD, JHU) that are doing interesting research in human language technology - a big area of interest for the military and intelligence communities. Lots of major corporations have facilities in the area, too - IBM, SRI, and BBN to name a few.

DARPA is in Arlington, Virginia, one of the most diverse and well-educated counties in the country. (And the smallest self-governing county in the country.) Arlington County is also a leader in smart growth, planning, sustainable growth (or whatever you call it), with places like Tyson's Corner, Virginia, openly pointing to it as the inspiration for what they want to become.

Yeah, this is hardly a definite list, it was just an off the top from two guys. In the tradition of "two points makes a trend line", we have Finland, b/c they are the (original) home of Linus Torvalds and also Nokia. What about Israel, Cambridge (UK), South Korea, Austin TX, New York City etc.

It's funny how it breaks down the Bay Area into San Francisco and Silicon Valley while on the other hand it puts entire Japan (population 130 mil) as one entry.

Yeah, weird how they didn't even explain that in the article. Oh wait... they did!

The whole San Francisco entry basically talks about why they made it a separate entry from Silicon Valley, and how its different.

From the article:

When we were coming up with this list I joked that San Francisco should be considered a separate region from Silicon Valley if only because companies from the valley actually turn a profit at some point. The differences between the two areas, however, are distinct and have become more apparent in recent years.

On the surface, it seems like San Francisco is sort of the mouthpiece for Silicon Valley; a place where the reporters and PR staff are kept so that they don't bother the engineers down in Palo Alto and Cupertino.

In reality, San Francisco has a technology sector all its own, one which blossomed with the rise of the "Web 2.0" era. Because an internet-based service doesn't require a large lab or factory space, startups were able to move from garages to small offices and apartments.

Today, companies such as Salesforce.com and Craigslist maintain their headquarters in San Francisco, while web sites such as Twitter have taken up residence in the trendy South of Market neighbourhood and made the former warehouse district the new hot place to find a start-up.

[...]

Silicon Valley is where you go to start up a business that needs lots of space to grow. San Francisco is where you come if you're a small services startup with low headcount that wants somewhere with good coffee and the best sushi this side of the Pacific.

Shaun and I may have had a giggle about the loss-making side of the business but the fact remains that online is king here.

[...]

The city is the heart of IT innovation, even if Silicon Valley is the soul.

"Boston itself is tiny and Cambridge certainly outclasses it for tech. This should really be the region bounded by I-495."

In popular usage, the region you describe is called "Boston". Cambridge may technically be a separate city, but most people think of it more as a large and culturally important neighborhood, and no small number are completely oblivious to the fact that it is different from Boston proper at all.

You're absolutely right. In Taiwan, you see the same clustering effects with most of the semiconductor fabs (TSMC, UMC), chip designers, flat panel manufacturers, electronics designers all clustered around Hsinchu and the Hsinchu Science Park [wikipedia.org]. Taiwan's "Silicon Valley" or technology hub is Hsinchu.

In Taipei, about one hour north, there are a growing number of software firms.

In Tainan, in southern Taiwan, there also is a cluster of flat panel and solar green energy firms.

Note though, that compared to many other parts of the world, Taiwan is a fairly small place. On top of that, the high speed rail [wikipedia.org] shrinks the distance between all the major cities so that the whole island in some way could legitimately be considered one large cluster. There certainly has been a spreading out of firms from Hsinchu to Taoyuan (30 minutes north) and Taipei (1 hour north), besides the clusters in central and southern Taiwan.

(Off topic, there are also a bunch of clusters for precision tools, bicycles, and many other industries! But I suppose none of those could possibly be conducted over internet)

I run a relocation biz in Chile. Chile is one of the most wired countries in South America.

Quality of life trumps connection in my experience.

I have a large pool of clients that are serious IT people that left the rest of the crazy world. They simple would prefer an o.k. connection, and a safe stable quiet place to work and for their families to live.

There is very little going on inside Chile as far as the IT industry is concerned, but it is a nice place to work compared to the rest of the World. They are p

Richard Florida (an economics prof.) wondered why his home town didn't keep the geeks that graduated from his school. They would graduate and then move elsewhere. Hi-tech companies couldn't get employees in spite of the fact that they graduated within five miles of the company.

What Florida discovered was that geeks want to live in certain places and not others. He wrote lots of papers and finally produced a popular book, 'The Rise of the Creative Class'.

He pointed out how Silicon Valley was able to flourish in spite of the fact that Boston was established in the hi-tech game. In Boston, employers can block employees from taking their knowledge to competing companies. In California, they can't.

Lots of things determine whether geeks will gather in a particular place. The place I would look for the next hi-tech paradise is southern Ontario. It has all the characteristics Florida found that attract geeks and hi-tech companies.

| The place I would look for the next hi-tech paradise is southern Ontario. It has all the characteristics Florida found that attract geeks and hi-tech companies.I doubt Hooters and old people driving with their signal lights on will do it.

The internet concentrated the jobs instead of spreading them out. Now if you're not geographically in Silicon Valley, your job can be done in Taiwan, so all the job seekers come to Silicon Valley. In the old days, you could have gotten a job in Nebraska. Not anymore. No-one even knows what Nebraska is anymore.

As a datapoint, my roomate and I (both MIT grads, for all that says about our geography skills?) were at a restaurant before the election and for shits tried to name every US state (which we both could in high school).

Not only did they miss a few, but the simple part of this is that those tech companies really don't go in big for telecommuting/teleworking. The one group of companies that would most be able to use it... oops!

Lots of places would like to be a high-tech hub.High tech is prestigious, brings high-paying jobs, has good health and safety and low (local) environmental impact.Lots of places build out infrastructure (roads, office parks, networks, schools, housing) hoping to become a high-tech hub.

Some of these places succeed, some fail.

It turns out (can't recall the source, sorry) that one of the best predictors of where you will actually get a high-tech hub is the size of the local homosexual community.

Weather may be a better predictor.
There is an interesting story about how Bangalore came to be the hub for India. In the 80's Texas Instruments wanted to set up shop in India. They visited Mumbai, Delhi etc. and stopped over in Bangalore. They liked the weather. So they sent another team headed by an Engineer called something Dickinson. He was walking around Bangalore and spotted a street called Dickinson street. He loved that and decided to set up a TI office on that street. Before that Bangalore was a r

If that were true, I'd expect Sydney, Australia to be a much larger tech hub that it currently is. We're basically the gay capital of the southern hemisphere, but all you're find here are some crappy branch offices of foreign corporations and boring local systems integrators.

So I think you're wrong about that, but one thing you said was spot on - what attracts both gays or geeks is *other* gays or geeks.

The fact that they both congregate in San Fran is pretty much a coincidence, I think.

Cisco: Absolutely huge campus (headquarters) in San Jose/Milpitas, in the Silicon Valley
IBM: Research in Almaden and Austin, headquarters in New York
GlaxoSmithKline: Headquartered in UK, U.S. offices split between RTP and Pittsburgh, PA
Bayer: World headquarters: Germany; U.S. headquarters: Pittsburgh, PA. Minor research in RTP
Sony Ericsson: Everywhere.
NetApp: Headquarters (and most offices) in Sunnyvale, CA, in the Valley
EMC: Headquartered in Massachusetts, major offices in the Valley and Chi

One of the big reasons high-tech has been so successful in California is the provision in the California Labor Code that prohibits employers from owning what you do on your own time.
No employment contract in California can override that. So you can do a startup while still
employed.

Employers hate this, but it's one of the big reasons for Silicon Valley's success. It also boosts innovation in aerospace and Hollywood, both major California industries.

It's pretty hard to take this article seriously considering the number of glaring copy errors. If the authors couldn't be bothered to reread what they wrote, how much time did they put into researching and considering the list itself?

You mean Cambridge isn't in Boston? It's in the Boston area, but not Boston itself. Also, no mention of the old(?) Route 128? Wasn't Bletchley Park better known for computerized decryption?Taiwan is only 2,000 miles from US soil? More like 5,000.

I was thinking the same thing. Robotics, medicine, IT, and manufacturing technologies especially. They definitely have a solid tech sector and as a percentage of the local industry it's pretty high. But as a percentage of the population it's not, and walking down the street you're more likely to meet a retired couple or a blue-collar worker than a geek in most of the neighborhoods. And if you work there you'd better not piss anyone off because all the geeks in Pittsburgh are between 1 and 2 degrees of s

I'll tell you why Pittsburgh isn't listed. Once you graduate CMU, you leave. If Pittsburgh could hold on to the CMU graduates, they'd have something, but they can't, so they don't.

Paul Graham talked about this very thing [paulgraham.com], including citing the problems of Pittsburgh-CMU conundrum. He posits that it's the lack of venture capital (or "rich people" as he put it) in Pittsburgh, but I suspect (as he seems to) that there's something more missing.

It's like the old joke, "if you live in the desert, go where the water is". I think we as technology professionals should watch with interest the turmoil on Wall Street, another industry that saw people pooling together in set places. While I think that having Silicon Valleys IS a very important and critical starting place, I KNOW from firsthand experience that content creation happens all over for the people who do it. I code from maybe midnight to 7AM every day, like clockwork. I work this way because I like the quiet of working at night. I work alone more often than not, and I like that free design process. I USED to work in a cube in a technology center while I was learning to code, but I think that the future is in people getting out of the 'me too' Valley mentality, and into the self aware entrepenurial mentality. For me this is what it takes, but part of the process was moving to the mountains to avoid all the city life distractions.

Personally, I don't see how anything gets done in office buildings period. They're all so grey and structured. I think imagination is a prerequisite for invention, and that we stack the cards against ourselves by focusing on one or 2 holy grail areas for technology.

Remember, garages are everywhere (at least in America), and I think that this pooling effect is not only not necessarily a good thing, but it might be why computing breakthroughs are slowing down (despite the hype). The last real cycle of innovation ended in the late 90s, and I would say that I don't see much of it now either.

On the one hand it lists entire countries: Finland, Japan, Romania, Taiwan and then gives separate entries to two places a few miles apart - one of which doesn't even exist on any maps. Silicon Valley is a warm, cuddly name dreamed up by the pundits in the 80's - it's not a place, any more than the Bermuda Triangle is.

Luckily, this list is merely someone's opinion and therefore not worth a damn.

Historian Richard Aldous considers that the Celtic Tiger has now gone the way of the dodo. In early 2008 all the talk was of soft landings and money-making resilience. By January 2009, the only question was whether the country can avoid a depression.

...

In January 2009 UCD economist Morgan Kelly predicted that house prices would fall by 80 per cent from peak to trough in real terms

"That's a disaster, and much of it is related to high-tech jobs leaving Ireland for elsewhere."

And for Ireland whoring itself out like a 40 year old thai prostitute to every multinational on the planet. A lesson to be learned for those that rant and rave on about how countries should capitulate to the threat of corporations moving offshore if their every whim and fancy isn't catered to in their home country. Ireland catered to every whim and fancy and then some. What happened? Some moved their charters to

This list is just silly. I mean Japan?! Come on. Japan is the size of the entire east coast of the US. How much sense would it make to put "The entire east coast" as one of the top 10 "places" where Tech is pooling. None. This list is nonsense.